Before the Battle - Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Archival giclée
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Description
A medievalist scene by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, depicting a woman embroidering while a man kneels before her, rendered in rich watercolours.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti produced this work in 1858, a period when his fascination with medieval themes and Arthurian legend reached a high point. The composition depicts a woman in a long, red gown, standing before a vertical frame. She is engaged in the act of embroidery, adding detail to a cloth that features ships and celestial motifs. A man in a blue tunic kneels at her feet, looking up towards her, while other figures are visible in the background, suggesting a busy workshop or domestic setting.
Rossetti employs a flattened perspective, typical of his early watercolours, which draws inspiration from illuminated manuscripts and early Italian art. The focus is on the narrative quality of the scene, with the figures arranged in a way that emphasises the domestic labour associated with the medieval period. The colour palette is dominated by deep reds, greens, and blues, applied with a precision that allows for the fine details of the clothing and the embroidery to emerge. The work reflects the Pre-Raphaelite interest in historical authenticity, though it remains a romanticised interpretation of the past rather than a strictly historical record.
This piece demonstrates the artist's ability to create a sense of quiet tension between the two primary figures. The woman remains focused on her work, while the man's posture suggests a moment of departure or anticipation. The inclusion of the embroidery frame serves to frame the central figure, creating a sense of enclosure within the composition. The work is a fine example of the mid-Victorian interest in the medieval world, a theme that occupied many artists of the Pre-Raphaelite circle during the 1850s. The attention to material texture, from the heavy fabric of the gowns to the delicate threads of the embroidery, is characteristic of Rossetti's technical approach during this decade.
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Specific Features
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Museum-grade giclée on FSC-certified archival matte paper, with framed and canvas options.
- Paper sizes: A4, A3, A2, A1, A0 and B2 (50×70 cm)
- Canvas: XS (20×30 cm) to Large (60×90 cm)
- Frames: black, natural wood, dark wood or white
Before the Battle - Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Artist Biography
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
He was born in London to an Italian political exile and named after the author of the Divine Comedy. His father was a professor of Italian at King's College. The household ran on poetry, politics, and argument. Rossetti wrote verse throughout his life and considered himself a poet as much as a painter.
His early paintings are small, bright, and meticulously detailed in the Pre-Raphaelite manner. The Girlhood of Mary Virgin and Ecce Ancilla Domini have the flat, jewelled quality of medieval altarpieces. After 1860 the style changed. The paintings became larger, more sensual, and dominated by the face and figure of Jane Burden, who was William Morris's wife.
The relationship between Rossetti, Morris, and Jane is one of the more uncomfortable triangles in art history. Morris married her. Rossetti painted her obsessively. She modelled for Proserpine, La Pia de' Tolomei, and dozens of other works in which she appears as a mythological woman trapped in an unwanted situation. Whether the affair was physical remains debated. Morris, characteristically, said nothing publicly and channelled his feelings into wallpaper.
Rossetti buried a manuscript of his poems in his wife Lizzie Siddal's coffin when she died of a laudanum overdose in 1862. Seven years later he had the coffin exhumed to retrieve them. He published the poems. He was addicted to chloral hydrate by then and increasingly paranoid. He died in 1882, at fifty-three.
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